Miss Julie and the Cinderella Thesis

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Julie's failed rebellion is the result of a "revolution that is unable to construe power in a new way. It dramatizes the sometimes pitiable, sometimes contemptible, vulnerability of one whose changing consciousness cannot create commensurate expression and one whose desires are easily twisted against her own interests. Read against the preface, as well as against Jean's judgments of Julie, the play conveys not a degenerate falling woman, but a woman who is beginning to move toward social and gender consciousness. Her recklessness attests both to her ignorance of self and world, and to her desperation. Her determination to satisfy her desires, which are more likely satisfied through social and personal change, leave Julie vulnerable to Jean's deterministic reduction of desire to vulgarized sexual need. Although her determination to fall is translated by the preface as determinism" it can also be seen as a challenge articulated through a radical reinterpretation of woman's role (Templeton 480).

The myth of Cinderella, although it suggests a radical role-shifting, does not fundamentally question notions of social class, given that Cinderella is revealed to 'really' be of higher birth than her status as a scullery maid in the cinders reveals. However, Miss Julie's vision is potentially radical -- she wishes to enjoy Jean as an equal, although her imagination is limited enough that her vision of equality entails dressing him in an aristocrat's garb. Jean's vision, it should be noted, despite his role as a bastion of culture as a male in Strindberg's view, is also quite narrow given that his fertile fantasy life has revolved around seeing Julie, and he rejects Christine when offered the possibility of elevating his status through sleeping with Julie.

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Strindberg's misogynist idea is that men, regardless their social class should rule and women should serve. He did not see his view as morally prescriptive however, in the ways that it is articulated through the fearful religiousness of Christine or Jean's social terror of the Count. Instead, Strindberg said that the point of his drama was to "seeks out those points where the great battles take place, which loves to see what one doesn't see everyday, which revels in the conflict of natural forces, whether they are called love and hate or rebelliousness and sociableness, and which cares not whether a thing is beautiful or ugly as long as it is magnificent" (Sprinchorn 123). The struggle between Man and Woman personified was for Strindberg an eternal one, a kind of mythic battle. But, it could be argued, that it is incumbent upon modern audiences to reinterpret this mythic quest in new terms. The Cinderella story must be rewritten again, just like Strindberg strove to rewrite it to encompass his own philosophy about drama and gender, and because his talents as a playwright are greater than those of his philosophy, his preface should not dictate new ways of interpreting and staging the complexities of Julie and Jean.

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